A Fresh Breeze: The Witness & Jonathan Blow

I was lucky enough to get a chance to interview Jonathan Blow, creator of the most challenging game of this generation “Braid”, and play a very early version of his next puzzler The Witness; so early that only the core structure will be preserved when it’s finally released.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to interview Jonathan Blow, creator of the most challenging game of this generation “Braid”, and play a very early version of his next puzzler The Witness; so early that only the core structure will be preserved when it’s finally released.

The island is small, but it’s complex, hilly and strangely landscaped. Blow later explains to me that he’s hired architects to help him establish a pre-history for the island, re-landscape it and redesign all the buildings to reflect the multiple peoples who have lived there. It’s a lot of hinterland to put into the background of a puzzle game, and is the thing that most reminds me of the obvious referent, Myst.

Over the next half hour, I wander past several other incomprehensible puzzles, escapees from Mirror’s Edge: a tangle of red girders balanced along the shore like children’s toys; orange geometric blocks jutting from the light blue sea; a cylindrical black monolith standing by itself in a glade; a buddha hardly noticeable in the shadow of a tree decal; a hole in a wall that forms a human face if looked at from an exact angle; an ancient oak tree covered in shoots of new life and surrounded by dead twigs. All this is place-holder?

This is a game about working your mind hard, becoming aware of the world around you and coming to appreciate it how it can be integrated with puzzles about sound, shadows, texture, mathematics, location, light and memory, never knowing what’s going to be relevant to the next puzzle. Like Blow’s Braid, it’s also about the expression of both philosophical concepts and of intriguing, rapidly-changing mechanics, though neither of these are forced on you. They produce a coherency to the world, give a cleanness and light to The Witness that’s hard to express; you’ll snark me off the site for being this synaesthetic, but it feels like a mix of the contrasty cinematography of Ibsen’s The Seventh Seal, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the sudden glare of fresh snow.

RPS have most of the content, but it’s worth pulling a few quotes out of the lonnnng interview I did with Jonathan:

…if there’s a puzzle that’s too difficult and 70% of players don’t get it… it’s o-kay. I’d rather have it, to be able to go to that depth or height or whatever. Cuz otherwise you’re saying a good video game is one that doesn’t alienate players and is linear and these things, then you’re saying that games can’t do puzzles of a certain complexity. Which I think is a shame.

Games have this very traditional thing where you find a key and the key gets you through a door. It’s like that here, except that the key is just what you understand. Concepts as keys.

The core idea behind the game has something to do with the very difficult question of who we are and why we’re here. What is it about walking around a world, looking at things and noticing things and being conscious of them? It’s a question a lot of people have asked throughout history and for which there are a number of approaches, in the wide sense. You might have a very scientific mindset and say, “all we know about the universe is that which we directly observe”, or you might have a philosopher’s mindset and base your things on argument… I wouldn’t break it into discrete avenues like that; there’s some scientific stuff, philosophical stuff, and spiritual and religious stuff, some just straight up pragmatist… and there’s this idea that this stuff is the space because the character is trying to figure out what way to go, trying to understand these things better.

With this, there’s no action-element, nobody’s going to kill you or a bomb that’s going to blow up in five minutes. It’s about building that space that’s pensive. Having the faith that what’s behind the puzzles is interesting enough that we don’t have to push the player with an emergency or drama or fight to survive. I like that because it’s a mood you don’t get very often, especially in games where you’re walking around a world. Usually if you’re playing a RPG and feel safe, it’s because you already killed everyone in the area. To have that be the game, to have it be a placid place, almost a meditative place, or just a calm, subconscious place.

There’s something about a flow of ideas that starts and goes places and keeps refining and evolving and ends up somewhere, even if it’s not linear, that seems more literary. In something like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which I haven’t read but I’ve seen the film, you start with a conceit, possibly several, and you ask “what happens in this situation” and every one of those questions has an answer that’s interesting. I don’t feel like we do that kind of thing in games yet; this sort of ended up there accidentally, where there’s this flow of ideas all the time. I kinda like it, now that the game’s designed, but I’m not going to pretend that I planned that.